White House rejects NBC Obamacare report

The Obama administration is strongly pushing back Monday night on an NBC News report that the White House has known for years that millions of consumers would lose their insurance under Obamacare.

“NBC ‘scoop’ cites ‘normal turnover in the indiv insurance market’. That’s a) not new b) not caused by #ACA c) the problem #ACA will solve,” White House principal deputy press secretary Josh Earnest said in a tweet.

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It comes as the Obama administration tries to climb out of the disastrous rollout of its HealthCare.gov site, which is now in its 28th day. Republicans are hoping to seize on the bad news with hopes of delaying or blocking the law.

NBC News’s investigative team reported Monday that up to three quarters of the 14 million Americans who buy insurance on the individual market can expect their coverage to be canceled by next year because of the law’s minimum coverage requirements. NBC said that the administration has known since July 2010 that at least 40 to 67 percent of customers would not be able to keep their policies, even though President Barack Obama said before the law passed — and repeated in 2012 — that if you like your plan, you can keep it.

Cancellation notices have gone out, and Obamacare opponents are hoping to capitalize on that fact.

The law requires insurance plans to meet basic standards after 2014. If they don’t meet those standards, insurers can no longer sell those plans unless they are “grandfathered” – or they existed before 2010 and haven’t changed at all since then.

So, if an insurer changed a premium or a deductible in 2013, the plan is no longer grandfathered under Obamacare and can’t be renewed in 2014.

The White House says it’s not forcing anyone off those plans – the insurers are if they change their policy and it loses its grandfathered status.

The law’s drafters said from the start that they’d eliminate low-quality insurance plans, arguing that the coverage was almost worse than no coverage at all if it still allowed consumers to go bankrupt from a catastrophic illness. Obamacare supporters say the same consumers can get better coverage through the health law.